![]() ![]() And it's available now at your favorite place to buy books, or online right here. Looking for a new movie to watch, or at least a movie that's new to you? Mental Floss's new book, The Curious Movie Buff: A Miscellany of Fantastic Films from the Past 50 Years, offers behind-the-scenes details and amazing facts about some of the greatest movies of the past half-century. Have you got a Big Question you'd like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at. ![]() ![]() But silver screens aren’t completely obsolete: They come in handy for 3D films, and there’s even special silver paint you can buy to create your own. These days, silver screen is often used metonymically to refer to the movies as a whole, rather than an actual screen. “The result is highly gratifying as the subjects stand out brighter even than before, the outlines being clear and sharp,” The Province wrote of the screen at Vancouver’s Majestic Theatre in July 1909. In 1900, the Isle of Wight Observer advertised an upcoming exhibition that would feature “The Latest Cinematograph (Living Pictures on the Silver Screen).” The technology began to catch on around 1910, when newspapers frequently reported on the installation of these shiny new screens in theaters across the U.S. That said, silver screens predated Williams’s early manufacturing endeavors by at least a couple decades. Silver screens are the best at reflecting even low light so that it’s perfectly viewable in a commercial or home theater, but since they use silver they can get quite expensive. His company, Williams Screen Co., was hugely successful throughout the ’50s. In the 1940s, he designed a vinyl one-whose metallic sheen initially came from fish scales-that helped usher in the shift to plastic screens. Williams started painting screens silver back in the 1920s and eventually did become a pioneer in screen production. Williams, a Kentucky-born circus stagehand-turned-projectionist based in Akron, Ohio. It’s unclear who first happened upon this discovery. They found that coating the screen’s surface with a layer of metallic paint (though not necessarily actual silver) heightened the contrast and cut down on blurriness. In the early 20th century, when projection technology was still far from producing the high-resolution images we enjoy in modern movie theaters, industry innovators started looking for ways to make the pictures pop. But the real origin of the phrase is less about the motion pictures than the screen itself. Maybe you assumed the term was the work of some long-forgotten Old Hollywood marketeer who thought it imbued black-and-white films with a sense of glamour that something like “the grayscale screen” couldn’t. For as long as you've been watching movies, you've likely heard them-and the entire industry surrounding them-referred to as the silver screen. ![]()
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